Mapping Roots in Derec Walcott's Omeros

Abstract

Like most epic poetry Derek Walcott’s Omeros concerns itself with the fate of a nation or people, in this instance ‘our wide country, The Caribbean Sea.’ Engaging with the epic genre, a form commonly identified as an ‘imperial genre’ highlights a problematic area for the postcolonial writer whose identity is necessarily ‘split’ or ‘hybrid’ as a result of the vicissitudes of colonial history. Marking an inner struggle, his troubled relationship to Western canonical texts has proved a most fruitful zone of inspiration for the poet whose own divided heritage causes him to frequently question how to choose ‘between this Africa and the English tongue I love?’ Seamus Heaney has made the point that Walcott has made a career out of the impossibility of choosing either. Omeros then, maps a program of cultural integration that has been a fundamental theme of his writing for decades. Assuming an entitlement to all the diverse cultural traditions available in the region he freely draws from African and European sources, and is irreverent in his ironic reconfigurations of mythic themes and figures. This article examines the role of the sea-swift as both transatlantic guide and as a central transcendent metaphor for cultural integration within the poem. Crossing east-west meridians the swift explores the cathartic potentiality of the journey, a trope that the poet continually invokes in his writing. For Walcott, the swift is a comfortable hybrid able to inhabit a mixed society, without forgetting the individual cultures that compose its heritage.